Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Goodbye Visual Studio macro’s, we will miss you…or not

For the people who have missed the news:

In the next version of Visual Studio(Visual Studio 11) the macros automation feature is taken out. This includes macro record/replay, macro projects and the Macros IDE. Based on some usage data that showed that less than 1% of Visual Studio developers use this feature, they decided to not invest in this feature anymore and focus on other improvements instead.

So starting from VS 11, if you want to automate some behavior in Visual Studio, you’ll have to create a Visual Studio extension.

You have the following extension options at your disposal:

Visual Studio Package: This is used for the older VSPackage style pugin-ins.

Editor Classifier: Used for creating your own syntax highlighting

Editor Margin: Used to adorn the margins in an editor window

Editor Text Adornment: Used to adorn text within an editor window

Editor Viewport Adornment: Used to place editor visuals relative to the editor’s visual surface

Macro has been dropped out in recent VS versions. An extensive extension for VS 2008/2010/2012/2013 may deserve a try, Visual Smarter: http://visualsmarter.blogspot.com/It has already more than 200 widgets and coders.